Here’s what I want to do. I want to write some of the things I have underlined in Abolition. Feminism. Now. Mostly though I will be citing from the first chapter on abolition. On the New York Women’s House of Detention that opened in 1932, “because of its proximity to the street provided access to communication that was unregulated and to a great extent unsurveilled by the prison, it also created conduits for organizing. … Prefiguring the Black Mamas Bail Out Action campaign initiated in 2017 by Mary Hooks of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), those on the outside raised money for bail, and women on the inside collectively decided who would benefit from the bail campaign.” (30-1). Here we see the dimensions of collectively from the outside and inside of Prison. Abolition over reform because “the recognition that the ideological impulse to contain all efforts to address the social damage wrought by prisoners within the parameters of “reform” serves to further authorize incarceration as the legitimate and immutable foundation of justice” (42). And of course the linkage between the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and capitalism the preceding page: “Because the rise of global capitalism also involved neoliberal strategies to disestablish services associated with the welfare state, unemployed people lost any vestiges of a safety net. Instead of directly addressing problems created by structural shifts in the economy. The stopgap “solution” of punishment consolidated the link between racism and criminalization” (41, emphasis mine). I believe that It is quite important to focus on the words “structural shift” in this connection between capitalism and the punitive state because these words remind us that the conditions of mass incarceration and poverty are human constructions. We can chose to construct a society and an economy that respects and nourishes human life. For abolitionists, “disarticulating crime and punishment created an opportunity to engage in a politics of rearticulation to counter the notion that prison was simply the appropriate sequel for the commission of crimes with the recognition that there are many reasons people end up behind bars and many needs experienced by those who are harmed” (47).
Just another quote: “Delinking health care and mental health services- and so many other necessary flourishing life functions such as housing and education- from jailing and other facets of the carceral apparatus is crucial. This process of delinking represents an important principle of abolition, which is to challenge the migration of carcerality from brick-and-mortar jails and prisons to the places in everyday life where surveillance and punitive control dominate other aspects of the state’s enterprise. (66).
Another link between surveillance and capitalism: “Strategically obscured are the high fees that people must pay for their own surveillance devices and the rapidly expanding marker for e-carceration. The for-profit GEO Group, which operates the largest number of private prisons in the US, also controlled, under its “GEO Care” division in 2018, about 30 percent of all monitoring devices” (72).
On Community care: Grassroots movements make changes. “That is, the NNJNYC [No New Jails NYC] campaign is not simply about what communities do not want, but, in the tradition of abolition feminism, is centered instead on what people need and want to be safe. Indeed, while the campaign slogan is “no new jails,” the more central demand is to invest public resources in what communities recognize as support for efforts to reduce interpersonal harm and to engender safety” (74).
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